It is not paranoid to believe that giant Internet corporations are after your personal data. That much is perfectly true?we only need argue about to what extent.

Whenever a new service that stores and shares data on our behalf launches?whether those data are contacts, files, or photos?people get rightly antsy about how the provider will manhandle our material. Recall how a developer discovered that social-networking service Path uploaded your entire contacts list from its iOS app to its servers back in February? We can accept that it was unintentional, but it revealed that Apple had a policy but no monitoring nor mechanism covering such behavior. (Path apologized, said it was only using the information for connecting people with existing Path members, and changed its software.)

Given this environment, one might suspect that Google would give more thought to how it described what it would do with files uploaded to and synchronized via its new Google Drive service, launched last week. Instead, the search firm linked to the overhauled centralized privacy and usage policies set a little less than two months ago. (The company took more than 60 separate policies and distilled them into one). By doing so, Google freaked out a number of Internet denizens, who wondered if the company was making a copyright grab and trying to pretend otherwise.